When she left her internship with Falling Whistles, an organization working toward peace in the Congo, Paula Truex, senior organizational major, was charged with finding 1,000 people willing to fill John R. Emens Auditorium and hear Falling Whistles founder Sean Carasso speak. Last night, her goal became a reality.
"It means the world to me that this auditorium is full right now," said Truex, grinning broadly to an audience of 1,667 people.
The room erupted into applause when Carasso took the stage.
"Hey guys!" Carasso said. "This is madness! There's so many of you!"
The journey of Falling Whistles started with Carasso's plane ride to South Africa to help his friend, Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS shoes, distribute shoes to children in need. After the shoe drop, Carasso said he wanted to just get lost.
The original plan was to spend five days in the Congo, learn all he could, then leave, but on the fifth day, he and a few others came across a military camp. A group of boys who had escaped from rebel militias and fled to national army camps for refuge were being beaten as enemies of the state.
"I freaked out," Carasso said. "I had never seen anything like this before."
They called everyone they could think of to rescue the boys, but no one listened. For the next eight hours, Carasso exchanged stories with the boys. They had been kidnapped from their homes and forced to serve as human shields for the militia, armed with nothing more than whistles because they were too young at the time to carry guns.
"The idea was that they would go out late at night and using the whistles and other things like pots and pans to scare away the enemy," said Carasso. "Failing that, they were supposed to receive the bullets with their bodies and in falling, create a blockade for other soldiers to hide behind."
As he spoke, photos flashed across the screen: a van destroyed by a RPG, soldiers in green uniforms standing near children they had decided to turn into miniature soldiers, a 13-year-old boy with a rifle, and a boy in a green, hole-filled T-shirt with the phrase "Extinct Forever" in yellow letters.
The encampment was exposed to the UN, and the children were rescued, but the seed for what was to become Falling Whistles had been irrevocably planted. When Carasso returned home that night, he wrote a blog post through tears called Falling Whistles and passed it to family and friends who spread it around the world. When Carasso came back to the United States, he was greeted by a friend with a hug and a metal whistle.
"Their weapon could be our voice," Carasso said. "Be a whistle-blower for peace."
Another voice is being raised through petitions.
The first petition Falling Whistles launched received 24,000 signatures across the country, resulting in three applicants being placed before President Obama as a special envoy to work to end the violence in the Congo.
For the second petition, instead of signatures, the group will use faces. As attendees left the presentation, others with iPhones and a Falling Whistles application photographed them. Each photograph will be a background for the phrase "I want peace in Congo," and in a year, each face will be faxed individually to the White House.
"There is a history we have been told, a history of big men on big stages," Carasso said. "Powerful people who are the ones behind the great, monumental moments in history ... and I believe it's all nonsense. I think history is written by you and me. It's written by the us-es."
For more information about Falling Whistles and the petition, find Falling Whistles on Facebook or at FallingWhistles.com.
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